With the advance of computer and internet technology, there appears a trend for the virtualization of personal computer (PC) OS. The PC OS no longer runs on the local real machine, instead is centrally managed in a remote data center where large amount of OSes are virtualized. Meanwhile, the desktop of the OS is delivered to the terminals via network. As an applied area of PC OS virtualization, this is called Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, or briefly VDI.
The VDI management software controls a large number of PC VMs in pooling in the data center, while a connection broker sends out RDP screen to desktop thin clients. The technology from VMWare ESXi, Citrix Xen, and Microsoft Hyper-V serves as the VDI foundation.
On the other hand, today's high-end Smartphone is starting to become similar to a personal computer. For example, a mobile handheld device such as the Blackberry or iPhone in today's market can go online, check e-mail, play music, stream videos, take pictures, navigate driving, or simply make a phone call. The demand of cell phone capabilities keeps on increasing. This leads to a high cost of cell phone manufacturing. Therefore, recently the concept of virtual mobile is proposed, namely the virtualization of large number of cell phone OSes with the resources and fix net of the data center, and the delivery of screen to cell phone terminal.
Compared to the traditional cell phone technology, virtual mobile has the advantages (1) a quick expansion of IT automation to anyone who carries a cell phone, with lots of old PC applications and new mobile applications executed on the VMs in the data center and screen-transmitted to cell phones. (2) Enabling virtualization will also allow the mobile devices to be more secure against virus attacks or lose of the physical device. (3) The screen of Mobile VM is much more adapted to the cell phone as a client, plus it requires much less transfer data, hence lower wireless bandwidth. (4) The cell phone client is able to take advantage of huge inexpensive resources of CPU, memory, disk, and fix net in the data center.
Under this virtual mobile background, a viable, highly effective Virtual Mobile Infrastructure (VMI) becomes an urgently-needed solution to the domain problem.